I have been throwing this around a little bit and talked to a few players. Even though it is self evident as to what direction a mage should go I still find it necessary to ask the CB community what you think about it. Back in yester year a single Tank/Archer could easily dominate higher PR characters by use of high NW. Now, in Cb2, it has become extremely difficult to do so. This leaves me with my Mage versus Tank scenario. With the introduction of the CoI modification, this month changes, etc it is agreed that the Mage is at an advantage over a Tank equipped with an Elbow. As pointed out to me, that changes as soon as the Tank performs double hits. In turn, that leads me to believe that Mages would need a Dex offset. My point is that I am very interested to see how this turns out. Can A Mage out perform a big tank at high PR's and NW? Can a Mage surpass the doom of an Elbow with less monetary investment? At what point does a Mage become more powerful than a Tank with a beefed up Elbow? I think it's interesting. I also think only time and patience will truly provide answers. After all, next month is a new month and we all know what that *may* mean.

Oh yeah, that would mean the Elbow isn't as valuable as before. DB's/CoI increase.

Well there is the one big thing that defines this idea. An Elven Long Bow could be used by many tanks. Single Archers, 2 minion teams, 3 minion teams which are very popular in CB2, and the normal high PR 4 minion team with one big tank hiding in the back.

Mages have...SMTOE and EEMM teams. I think that is the only teams they have. Also, they really don't have much room for unique ideas. So it's really tough to call seeing how things change so quick each month.

Hejin is a CB1 single mage that uses DB's, evasion, and dex to be a tank killer. It doesn't look like it works as well here, just because there aren't as many tanks to take on. Since a mage can train evasion, that puts their DB's at about a +50 advantage, and with the curve on +'s to weapons, it's not hard to keep your DB's up to their + to hit (assuming it's not that crazy x27 +260 or something elbow). As a single mage, it isn't hard to stay close enough to their dex to bring their hit percentage down to 50% or so. And considering mages don't wear armor with dex penalties (discounting the corn), in CB1 it worked even better.

If you equal the dex of a tank, they have a 50% chance of hitting from their single dex based attack.

No mage is going to equal the dex of a tank. It's not worth wasting the xp for a 50% defense. Even though you do cut out the tanks ability of getting a second dex based attack. That XP is far better used in the mages DD spell.

Evasion will never get to +50 (unless it's been changed radically since CB1), +20-30 is a more reasonable estimate. So with Evasion + DB s a mage needs to beat the pth of the tanks weapons to avoid the (theoretically) limitless pth based attacks a tank can get.

That's quite possible to do.

The problem is when we start to factor in ToA Elbow archers. Smart ones will leave their Str at base from the ToA (as damage is heavily weighted toward weapon stats) but pump their Dex and HP (along with Archery and any other ED/EO's they fancy).

This means no mage will ever equal a ToA Tanks dex.

Then they get an additional +50 pth. If you;ve been lucky enough to have a high evasion (lets say +25) and kept your DB's equal to the + of their wepaon, that still leaves you with a pth based attack 25% of the time. For each ranged round.

Archers will dominate. For a time. Then it will get increasingly harder for them to up the X or + on thier bow, and while the + on a mages DB s will be just as hard to increase, they damage they get from their DD spell will increase as usual.

Not the greatest of help for a CoC mage, as they will need to last through three ranged rounds, but given enough time, a FB and MM mage will be able to out damage an Elbow archer in ranged.

Assuming the evasion curve hasn't changed (I see no reason for it to have, unless weapon upgrade curves have as well), in 6 months 50 evasion won't be a problem. 50 evasion is about 1 week's worth of experience. Then you never have to touch it again (assuming similar rewards to CB1 [pre 20min refresh rate]).

Things we agree and disagree on:

So it's slightly harder here to equal or beat a tank's dex, but that's simply due to tattoos. They take up that pesky armor slot, so not many people equip that huge armor with massive dex penalties. Then again, it also means one less thing to upgrade, and a bit less AC for your DD to have to cut through.

If you can equal the other person's dex, there's a 50% chance, but from my testing, that percent to hit drops off pretty quickly even with slight dex advantages. I would say a mage can equal the dex of any nonTOA tank (I am making no claims as to how effective this strategy currently is; with more single tanks in the game it could be worthwhile, currently it is doubtful.)

Things we agree on:

A TOA tank, like you said, not a chance unless they put all their earned exp into archery and hps. (completely discounting their extra +50, of which I am still unsure how it works: is it dex attacks, + to hit weapon attacks, +50 TOA attack, so 50 evasion total negates it; or is it dex attacks, + to hit and +50 TOA attacks, so that it stacks with weapon +'s?)

OK, I might have been a bit pessimistic with my proposed Evasion levels.

Jon clarified that at equal dex, the chance to hit is 50%. From some very small testing I did, with 10% less dex your chance to hit around 40% (so I assume the the chance to hit for the higher dex is 60%..). The problem for using dex as a defence is that in the best case senario (no ToA) you should be able to keep your dex equal to the tanks (you train Eva, HP, Dex, DD - they train Arch, HP, Str, Dex) but the 50% is constant.

2 years down the line, you will both still have equal dex, still not changing their chance to hit from dex from 50%.

Damage from a DD spell is linear, that 2 years worth of xp put into your DD spell gives you more bang from your buck. leading you to out damage even their double/triple hits.

I think (but I'm really not sure..) the 50% chance of an attacks granted by the ToA is just like +50 pth which is added on to your weapon pth.

One last point: equal dex means a 50% miss rate, like you said. Don't forget that is translated into a 75% damage reduction.

No dex mage, double hit each round. 4 hits every two rounds.
Dex mage, hit once every other round. 1 hit every two round.

With the changes to DD:physical damage ratio here in CB2, I'm inclined to think you're more likely to be able to spare the dex. Not that I'm quite sure how it'll work out in the long run, and even if it did work, you'd still need to have enough tanks around that you could farm...so currently, it isn't likely viable due to lack of targets.

I'd love to find out how the TOA to hit bonus works. If it is an additional +50 on top of the weapon bonus, it's pretty neat. If it's applied seperately, then most anyone with DB's will negate it in a couple months.

I shouldn't be debating with you anyway, as you're the single mage expert from back in the day. =)

I wasn't the expert by far!! Inde (and a few others? Soz, can't remember who) had single mages that performed better than Ken! I was just a little more vocal.

I did try Dex, I was aiming to have Dex + DB/Eva to make me immune to physical hits and AMF for Magic. But I just couldn't stop the first dex based hit, and archery did so much more damage then!

It's a tough call, I keep getting drawn back to trying out a dex based mage. But ToA's put me off. And If i use a ToA to counter theirs (Instead of a ToE) I'm wasting half of it if I don't use the Str/pth.

:/

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